Chinese/Japanese music

I'm very interested in Asian music/culture, and I was fortunate to have been able to play with a couple of real talented koto players a few years ago, Ms. J and Ms. Y. First of all, I played my 12 tone acoustic guitar, and the tunings matched up pretty well, overall. Of course, that wasn't totally surprising, since I believe that Chinese and Japanese tuning is based off the first four 5ths in the spiral, C-G-D-A-E, which isn't much different from 12 eq. Ms. J didn't seem to know much about the basis of her tuning, of course, most Western musicians don't, either. I did notice that her major 3rd was way sharp to mine, and of course the Pythagorean 3rd is indeed sharp to 12 eq; but, this seemed like more than just a mere 8 cents...since I didn't measure it, I'm not sure. Ms. Y, knew a bit more about tunings, and mentioned that she occasionally tuned her semitone to about 85 cents...but again, guitar and koto matched up well. What I also discovered from playing with these ladies was that Japanese music used a lot more notes than the typical pentatonic scale that is supposed to be the root of these systems. One of Ms. J's pieces had 10 out of 12 tones, which was interesting for me to discover.
I also chatted with Mei Han by email recently; she's a zheng master in Vancouver, who was just profiled in Musicworks mag...here's what she said about Chinese tuning: "Microtone scales is very foreign to traditional Chinese tuning systems, although, you may already know, Chinese invented and practically used 12 tone system as early as 5th century BC." She also mentioned that some other zheng styles used bent notes that could be considered microtonal. We also brought pipa master Gao Hong in for a show a few years ago, and the pipa is definitely in 12 eq, but she did a piece with bent microtonal notes, much like a blues guitarist.
Alain Danielou, in his book "Music and the Power of Sound," had a chapter on Chinese music, and said that they went as far as 60 notes in the octave, derived from the spiral of 5ths (and I cannot vouch for his knowledge, I am hoping he knew his stuff). He also pointed out that the Chinese system related the numerology in their system to Universal concepts, such as the seasons, yin and yang, and many other metaphysical phenomenon. Of course, from my studies of tunings, it's apparent that most cultures, from Indian to Arabic to Greek and Chinese, believed that the numbers which manifested themselves in tuning systems were also found in the basic fabric of the Universe, and thus music and the way it is tuned has a very deep relation and significance to spiritual issues and concepts, far beyond just the act of playing music. It's known that Pythagoras, for example, had a special reverence for the number 3, and this is why he developed the concept of 5ths based music at the expense of the higher harmonic numbers. It's mainly just in the last few hundred years, with the dominance of the European , 12 eq system of tuning and the assertion of the scientific method of viewing life, that the deeper spiritual meanings of music/tunings have been largely forgotten.
Interesting stuff, for sure...best...HHH